Etymon #69
A new step
This word is native to English, present in the Old English Hexateuch, an illustrated translation of the Bible's first six books, dated to roughly 1025 to 1050, one of the last major works of Old English prose before the Norman Conquest in 1066. The word names part of a doorway, and the unknown translators used it when describing the Israelites being told to mark their doors with blood.
Formed within English, not borrowed from anywhere else. Its root had already existed for centuries before this compound was built from it, one shared by Old English, Old Norse, Old Saxon, and every other Germanic language, all descended from a single common ancestor. As it settled into English, two sounds inside the word swapped places, a shift called metathesis, and the word has never fully recovered its original shape since.
The root beneath the word meant simply to step on, to press down with the foot, again and again. One theory holds that the word first named a patch of hard-packed ground just outside a house, flattened over years by the same daily footsteps. The word's second half has never been explained with any certainty, its own ancient meaning lost even to the Germanic languages that inherited it.
THREAD and THROW share the same distant root as this word. THREAD comes from an Old English word for twisted cord, from a root meaning to twist, the same root that gave English the verb for pulling something taut through a needle's eye. THROW once meant something quite different from hurling an object. Its Old English ancestor meant to twist, and only later did it come to mean casting something through the air.
For centuries the word named part of a doorway. Its first figurative use appears in an Old English translation of Bede's Ecclesiastical History, a history of the early English church originally written in Latin around 731 AD, translated into English in the late ninth century as part of King Alfred's programme of learning. It recalls a dying man from the edge of death. Queen Elizabeth I gave it a new meaning in 1593, in her own translation of Boethius, no longer a doorway but the point at which a person's happiness begins. By 1834 it had drifted further still, marking not death or joy but the passage into adulthood.
